It sounds to me like you're asking for more effective advertising of books you'd want to read.
That's really tough; no one's ever found a way to consistently filter books. Someone like James can be consistently interesting, on top of a couple decades of reputation, but it's very hard to tell if someone else will like the book.
Fanfic communities can work for that because they've got large numbers of people feeding into rating systems and filters and there's no possibility of getting paid for legally doubtful content. That no possibility of getting paid is structurally important; you have to get status via gift-culture mechanisms, rather than a larger pile of money. It, literally, keeps people honest. The pre-existing commonality of interests involved in being in the fandom in the first place matters a lot, too; "the fandom" is a better target than "readers, generally" for just about everything to do with both writing and reading. (This is why there's genre. Fanfiction is effectively a non-commercial genre, busily developing its own internal conventions and expectations and terminology.)
There are some examples of co-opting pre-existing communities to, in effect, get paid for fanfic, but those -- like any other major fandom -- more closely resemble ethnogenesis than they do advertising. I think that's ethically unsupportable as a deliberate act.
Indie authors don't have the money to advertise and can't spend it effectively in any case (where would you advertise?); the thing with books is that the major constraint on supply -- the risk capacity of publishers -- has collapsed and the result is going to destroy the commercial utility of fiction, since it's pretty much impossible to compete with free and there's this endless tide of free because people naturally tell stories. (and some of the free's good.)
I mean, sure, Amazon's deliberately working towards that outcome, but it's pretty clear that most habitual readers don't insist on a copyedit. The value-add involved in traditional publishing isn't value-add enough for people to be generally happy about paying for it. Quality filters are pretty much a negative; fanfic prospers in large part because it does things that aren't otherwise available because of the traditional quality filters.
So that's eventually going to push books into a community thing where there isn't much of a mechanism to allow for the possibility of getting paid, much as music acts (and cartoonists) are using the music to get people to buy t-shirts and that supports the musicians. (and is also more ethnogenesis.)
There just can't be that many tribes; people will cheerfully belong to several, but the strength of feeling isn't freely available.
So I figure written fiction is going to turn into a very quiet corner of the artistic landscape; there's too much to read and too much to keep track of so there's no possibility of a canon or a common universe of discourse outside relatively rare fandom ethnogenesis events. More or less what's already happened to poetry.
no subject
That's really tough; no one's ever found a way to consistently filter books. Someone like James can be consistently interesting, on top of a couple decades of reputation, but it's very hard to tell if someone else will like the book.
Fanfic communities can work for that because they've got large numbers of people feeding into rating systems and filters and there's no possibility of getting paid for legally doubtful content. That no possibility of getting paid is structurally important; you have to get status via gift-culture mechanisms, rather than a larger pile of money. It, literally, keeps people honest. The pre-existing commonality of interests involved in being in the fandom in the first place matters a lot, too; "the fandom" is a better target than "readers, generally" for just about everything to do with both writing and reading. (This is why there's genre. Fanfiction is effectively a non-commercial genre, busily developing its own internal conventions and expectations and terminology.)
There are some examples of co-opting pre-existing communities to, in effect, get paid for fanfic, but those -- like any other major fandom -- more closely resemble ethnogenesis than they do advertising. I think that's ethically unsupportable as a deliberate act.
Indie authors don't have the money to advertise and can't spend it effectively in any case (where would you advertise?); the thing with books is that the major constraint on supply -- the risk capacity of publishers -- has collapsed and the result is going to destroy the commercial utility of fiction, since it's pretty much impossible to compete with free and there's this endless tide of free because people naturally tell stories. (and some of the free's good.)
I mean, sure, Amazon's deliberately working towards that outcome, but it's pretty clear that most habitual readers don't insist on a copyedit. The value-add involved in traditional publishing isn't value-add enough for people to be generally happy about paying for it. Quality filters are pretty much a negative; fanfic prospers in large part because it does things that aren't otherwise available because of the traditional quality filters.
So that's eventually going to push books into a community thing where there isn't much of a mechanism to allow for the possibility of getting paid, much as music acts (and cartoonists) are using the music to get people to buy t-shirts and that supports the musicians. (and is also more ethnogenesis.)
There just can't be that many tribes; people will cheerfully belong to several, but the strength of feeling isn't freely available.
So I figure written fiction is going to turn into a very quiet corner of the artistic landscape; there's too much to read and too much to keep track of so there's no possibility of a canon or a common universe of discourse outside relatively rare fandom ethnogenesis events. More or less what's already happened to poetry.